Experiencing the peace of acceptance amid the pain of loss

Mental, emotional and spiritual maturity could be defined amid grief as that state of acceptance within loss.  We get little tastes of it, even tantalisingly so, as we traverse even the earliest phases of the grief journey outbound of loss.  But just as quickly as that mirage of acceptance comes, we’re thrown back into catastrophe — bargaining, anger, depression, denial... despair.

The challenge is acceptance and living in that cherished destination, even as we come to accept that acceptance isn’t as much a destination as a state.  It is the gift of reprieve.  It is God’s anointing of peace that gives us hope that there is more available on the horizon.

But how do we get to that place?

How do we make the most of our times there?

The first thing we can do is plan for the times when acceptance arrives, and we may find that it surprises us so much we hardly recognise it’s the peace of acceptance, because we tend to just make hay while the sun shines.  We might plan, however, to be stiller than normal, enjoy the moment while it lasts, take counsel from the ages, and simply sit in the moment of it, to learn to inculcate the state — to imbibe it so that state can more and more become us.

As we stay in that place and don’t idolise it, resisting the temptation to lament the first sign of the return of despair, we make the despairing less to be resented, because we don’t make our lack of feeling acceptance the cause of frustration.

Fred Rogers famously said that, “every human experience is mentionable, and because everything is mentionable, everything is manageable.”  If only we didn’t resist the pain so much.  If only we would accept that it’s in the pain of despair that we most often reach out and up toward God.

Grief is actually the great invitation to know our God, because God is at the depths much more than anywhere else.  How do we know this?  When do we need God most?  When we’re at our depths.  So we can see then that as we reach out and up for God in our depths that God is there to be experienced.  See how good grief is?  If not for grief, we might hardly know God.

Grief is God’s opportunity to return to where it all began to be remade and repurposed in the image of the one who can, and has, overcome.

Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash